A Letter from Sweden
by Susan Sontag
Dear...
ou ASK ME TO TELL ABOUT SWEDEN after Spending
seven months of the last twelve living here. I'll tell
you what I can, but please remember that my im-
pressions are specialized and local. The Sweden I
know is first of all a place where I've been working. More
than that: the place where I've been able to do something-
writing and directing a movie—that has given me more
pleasure than any work I've ever done. I know the work has
been good not just because of my loving relation to it but
because I've done it here, in a country whose cultural policy
is so generous to the independent film-maker. Sweden's
cinema industry in its present phase, which dates from the
reforms pioneered by Harry Schein that led to the establish-
ment of the Swedish Film Institute in 1963, is probably the
only one in the capitalist world operating with a strong bias
in favor of independent directors making "art" (called here
"quality") films, where a director is free of the usual financial
and bureaucratic pressures of commercial film-making while
given a budget and facilities adequate for entirely professional
work. One is simply encouraged to do one's best and left
alone—with one's crew and actors—to do it. Although I
would have gone anywhere on earth for the chance of getting
started as director, there's probably no place where it would
have been as pleasant as Sweden. To go on working in Sweden
is certainly tempting—I have complete freedom to do what I
w a n t - a n d I'll probably return to do a second movie for the
same company in June 1970.
And yet, part of me dreads the prospect of remaining a
Swedish film-maker. Not because of the conditions of work
here, which in most respects are ideal, but because if I'm to
spend a number of months every year or two living here
Copyright ©1969 by Susan Sontag
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while I make films, I've got to deal with the profound quarrel
I have with much of the quality of Swedish life. Perhaps I
expected too much of Sweden, the celebrated paradise of
Social Democracy, as many foreign visitors must do. And
certainly, I wasn't prepared for the uniqueness of Sweden. Be-
fore coming here for the first time last April (shortly before
my trip to North Viet-Nam), I imagined Sweden a little
America, with traits of West Germany and Japan, too: six-
lane highways, suburban shopping centers, TV, sideburns,
automated factories, imaginative children's books, hip youth,
Viet-Nam demonstrations: all the comforts and woes and
efficiency of industrialization, the consumer society—but
refined and partly detoxified by the condition of advanced
"welfare state" enlightenment. And while it's all here, and
while Sweden does have more in common with these countries
than any others (though often, particularly in its similarities
to Japan, diff'erent features than I had imagined), it mostly
hasn't been as I expected.
The experience of any new country unfolds as a battle of
cliches—especially if the country is, hke Sweden, a rather
famous one. (Some countries are more famous than others,
and similar laws of celebrity—the false optics of fashion; the
cruel swings of admiration, envy, and excoriation—apply to
countries as to people.) I came prepared to see through the
familiar negative cliches about Sweden—and found many of
them disconcertingly confirmed. What's odd is that I've had
no end of help in this from the Swedes themselves. Swedes
love to talk about Sweden and, in private, to join the exas-
perated foreigner in putting down the quality of life here. In
part, this merely reflects the Swedish dislike of argument and
controversy—they're all too ready, for my taste, to agree with
RAMPARTS 23
foreign visitors as they are with each other. But partly, I
think, the conversations I've had reilect the quite genuine gift
for self-criticism that flourishes here. There's no complaint
I can make about Sweden that a number of Swedish acquaint-
ances haven't volunteered to me themselves. That's disarming,
at least at first. Eventually, it may seem like an evasion. TTie
Swedes so evidently distinguish between the character of life
in Sweden and the character of the country as a progressive,
rational social experiment, with the result that criticizing the
former doesn't necessarily lead to any conclusions about the
latter. A foreigner, of course, will be moved to try to connect
the two—and run smack into the vast self-satisfaction and
national sense of security that adjoins their talent for self-
disparagement.
HEIR HIGH DEGREE OF NATIONAL Self-COnSCioUSneSS is
partly what you would expect of a population with
the highest per capita income in the world and a
Strong conviction of their country's moral superiority.
The Swedes take evident pride in Sweden's uniqueness, its
vanguard role on the international scene. Sounds rather
American, doesn't it? But theirs is a very different kind of
pride. Americans, also powered by a sense of their uniqueness
as a nation and its identity with virtue, not only view their
own virtue as exportable but consider that they have an urgent
mandate to export it (and to make a profit from it: imperial-
ism). Swedes see themselves as exemplary in a more passive
style. They are neither in a position nor disposed by tempera-
ment to export aggressively what they practice—post-puritan
sexual mores, good taste and generosity to the arts, rational
economic planning, frictionless social justice, solicitude for
the urban environment—but confidently await the inevitable
movements of history that will lead other nations to imitate
them. What happens in Sweden, more than one Swede has
told me, happens five or ten or fifteen years later in some other
advanced part of the world.
But uniqueness also means separateness. Proud as the
Swedes are of their accomplishments (i.e. their modernity),
they also speak often, and less confidently, of Sweden as a
remote, rather isolated nation. Their policy of neutralism, their
advocacy of humanitarian standards before international
policy bodies where other nations pursue narrow self-interest
or see straight power politics not only provides a source of
national self-esteem but reinforces their psychic burden (of
isolation). People speak of taking a holiday in "Europe" as
the English do of traveling to the "Continent." Whenever
something goes wrong for the foreigner here, a Swede is quick
to remind one that this is a small country—less than eight
million people in a land area that makes it the fourth largest
nation in Europe. And however fulsomely they may agree
with sympathetic foreigners who criticize the country while
they're here, Swedes are extremely sensitive to, and defensive
about, any criticism published about their country abroad.
The ignorant, demagogic crack that Eisenhower made in 1960
before a Republican National Committee breakfast in Chicago,
singling out Sweden's supposedly rising suicide rate and
ascribing it to the country's "socialistic philosophy," is still
mentioned with bitterness. They are really bugged that most
people abroad think that Sweden has the world's highest
suicide rate. (It's the ninth highest in the world, the fifth
highest in Europe—trailing Austria, Denmark, Finland, and
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Switzerland—and the rate has remained stable for over 50
years.) Educated attacks such as Kathleen Nott's book from
the early 1960's, A Clean Well Lighted Place, continue to
rankle. Two weeks ago the news that David Frost was coming
to interview Olof Palme, the Minister of Education and long
considered the heir apparent to the Prime Minister, for British
television made the front page of all the tabloids. A naive
hope circulated around town that this interview would dispel
some of the Ike-type slanders and let Sweden finally get across
to the world. Everybody wants to be loved, I know. But the
Swedish need has a special urgency, which probably follows
from the conviction of their own virtue. This national desire
to be loved also informs their willingness to put themselves
down. Swedes want you to understand that their intentions
are never bad, though their means of executing them may be
faulty. Whatever misconceptions exist could be cleared up if
people had a little more patience. They know something is
wrong with the quality of Swedish life. Indeed, just that is a
perennial topic of national debate, as well as of private con-
versations with foreigners. Swedes speak quite readily, and
usually defensively, of their national character: "We're shy,"
"we're clumsy," "we're inhibited." And all Swedes who travel
assert that they feel freer, behave more expressively abroad,
while at the same time always feeling safe because they are
Swedes. ("If only you knew me as I am when I'm in Spain."
Or ". . . in New York." Or ". . . in Italy.") But they are sad-
dened if you show you really mind what so evidently bothers
them in their intercourse among themselves. Swedes so often
treat themselves as a "case," operating a kind of moral black-
mail through the display of their vulnerability.
OR so SELF-CONSCIOUS A PEOPLE, THOUGH, they are
notably unpsychological. Psychiatry—in any of the
forms derived from Freud—has never taken root
here. To be sure, psychological tests administered by
free-lance consultants are a standard part of hiring and pro-
moting procedures in all large industrial firms and in the
government bureaucracies; a minor being considered for
promotion to foreman of his shift and an applicant for the job
of producer on the new (second) TV channel will both have
to undergo a battery of such tests. But this reliance on pro-
fessional psychologists only gives further evidence of how
insensitive psychologically the Swedes are: the appraisal of
people, it's felt, is best not left to ordinary on-the-scene
judgment. Swedes show a strong aversion to reflecting about
motives and character. The remarks people pass about each
other at work and after social encounters are terse and flat.
The usual thing one hears a Swede say about someone is
that he or she is "nice." Less often, "not nice": a great effort
is made to find people nice. Any extended scrutiny of some-
one's character, that staple of everyday middle-class conver-
sation in the United States, gets little response here—as if
Swedes can't fathom the reason behind the expenditure of
that kind of intellectual effort. Generally, I've noticed, Swedes
are not given to puzzling over things. Whenever possible,
situations and words are taken at face value.
Underscoring the avoidance of psychological insights, much
of conversation proceeds by quantifying. For instance: how
many hours of sun there were this month, or when one got to
sleep last night, or how much someone pays for his apartment.
Hard liquor (like whisky and brandy), a particularly anxiety-
Photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson (Magnum)
 provoking substance, is ordered not by the glass or shot but
by the centiliter (it comes in two, four, six and eight); beer is
classified into weak, medium, and strong and must be ordered
that way. Numbers come up often when the Swedes talk. They
are almost as statistics-conscious as Americans—not to show
off or as a crude tool of intellectual mastery but more simply, I
think, because numbers are emotionally neutral, and their
casual use can make intimate matters seem impersonal.
The Swedes flee the psychological dimensions in another
way, by being notably secretive about their personal lives.
Though outstandingly honest in the sphere of work and public
order, they are often not candid. The hne between personal
and public is drawn a little differently here. In one sense, there
is less privacy in Sweden than in any other advanced industrial
country. For instance, salaries are discussed openly, and the
government publishes a book listing the salaries and incomes
of everyone making over 20,000 kronor ($4000) a year. One
sees far fewer walls and hedges surrounding private houses
here than in England and America. People undress casually,
but not at all exhibitionistically, in front of each other in the
sauna, for swimming, to lie in the sun. But the absence of
some of these familiar taboos creating privacy doesn't indicate
a more intense community life. It rather signifies the traditional
inability of the person in Sweden to defend himself against
the demands of the community, so far as he constitutes himself
a member of it. The possibility of deep, radical withdrawal still
remains—and is frequently exercised. The major zone of
withdrawal is simply that of feelings, as distinct from informa-
tion about status and objective behavior. For a Swede to
show how he feels, if the feeling is a vehement one, is a grave
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enterprise. By counter-signs then, one could conclude that
the Swedes are an extremely passionate people. Yet no modern
city I know is as quiet as Stockholm, and almost all the noise
comes from machines. People contribute low voices on the
telephone, hushed murmuring in restaurants, mild applause
after any lecture or spectacle. I remember a couple of rock
concerts I went to in September at the Konserthuset, the
biggest auditorium in town. The Doors came one night,
Jefferson Airplane another, and played to capacity audiences
of beautiful long-haired kids, most of them decked out in East
Village-Haight Ashbury tribal regalia of two years ago and
many already stoned or turning on in the corridors, by ap-
pearance a classic Fillmore crowd—except for their sound.
These kids sat absolutely still and quiet, applauding amiably
at the end of each number. The only time I've heard Swedes
raise their voices was at the international ice hockey champion-
ship games in March, and even that was awfully decorous,
intermittent shouting.
Talking apparently never ceases to be a problem for the
Swedes: a lean across an abyss. Every time a conversation
starts, you can feel the physical tension mount between the
speakers. (Oddly enough, though, the Swedes are very gifted
at languages. English is not only mandatory throughout the
school years but so well taught that almost everyone here
under thirty-five is virtually bilingual.) What to talk about is a
problem. Favored topics are: the weather (Swedes never stop
suffering from the cold, the lack of sun); money (they are
shameless about telling or asking how much something costs);
liquor (more about that later); and plans of action (from
saying "I'm going to pee" when leaving the room for a
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minute to announcing a vacation). Once underway, dialogue
tends to have a certain pedantry; people balk if you skip steps
in explaining something or jump around from one topic to
another. And conversations are always in danger of running
out of gas, both from the imperative of secretiveness and
from the positive lure of silence. Silence is the Swedish national
vice. Will you laugh if I invoke Greta Garbo? Honestly,
Sweden is full of prosaic, graceless mini-Garbos. And of
moments from Bergman films as well, the ones when people
mutely express the torment of being unable to say what they
feel. The evidence I have that has confirmed this venerable
imagery of Sweden all comes from Stockholm, the only part
of Sweden I know. But everything I've heard indicates that
this holds even more true for the north. In Norrland, Stock-
holmers have told me, people hardly talk at all. Families go
for months, especially during the long night of winter, without
exchanging more than a few sentences with each other. The
farther north, everyone says here, the bigger and more un-
breakable the silence. And conversely, people south of
Stockholm are reputed to be a little more outgoing and talk-
ative, the flow increasing mile by mile all the way to SkSne, the
southernmost province, whose natives are known in the rest
of Sweden as "reserve Danes" (Danes having the reputation
here of a positively Latin jollity). Of course, there's a difl"erence
between young people and older people as there is between
North and South. Swedish youth, as in all the advanced
countries now, is everywhere more "southern"—more out-
going, expressive, emotional; less compulsive—than its elders.
N
OT ONLY SECRETIVENESS MAKES the Swedcs silcnt;
it's a whole system of anxieties, a perception of
the world as extremely dangerous, treacherous.
The source of treachery is, one must surmise,
themselves as much as the Other—though it's anyone's
guess which has psychological priority, the fear of another's
aggression or of one's own. In this taboo-ridden country,
perhaps the most notable taboo is raised against the signs
of aggressiveness. Policemen on the street are invariably
polite; though most (but not all) carry guns, the police are
respected and often trusted, at least as much as in England, but
they are also more feared, because the level of guilt about
infractions of the social code, such as being drunk in public, is
much higher than in England. But the cops only deal with
gross matters; the most severe policing of aggression is done
by each Swede himself. Their marked avoidance of aggression,
even in its minimal forms, comes through in the Swedes' mild
voices, and in the low noise level in public places, the inhibi-
tion of crowds even at euphoria-provoking or outrageous
spectacles and entertainments. (Judith Malina and Julian
Beck say that Stockholm is the only city the Living Theatre has
played in Europe and the United States where at least some
members of the audience didn't respond, with insults and
catcalls, and by walking out, to such deliberate provocations
as the "empty" opening twenty minutes of Mysteries. The
entire Stockholm audience just sat politely, and waited.) One
hardly ever hears people quarreling, and there is a strong
aversion to disagreement as such. The Swedish avoidance of
antagonism sometimes goes to really supersonic extremes. I
remember one evening last autumn after a day's shooting
out in the suburbs returning to town with my assistant, pro-
duction manager, and script girl; we were heading for a new
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restaurant to have dinner, but nobody was sure exactly where
it was. Someone said, "I think you continue two more blocks
and turn right." The driver of the car said, "No, we go three
blocks and turn left." In an entirely pleasant tone the first
person said, "No, go two blocks and turn right." After which
the third Swede in the car intervened quickly with "Now, now,
let's not quarrel."
Do you understand what I found sad in this ludicrous
moment, and in many similar micro-dramas? There are few
qualities I admire more than reasonableness; and I'm far from
admonishing the Swedes for not embodying some lush
standard of Mediterranean temperament and volatility which
is not my own either. Still I'm convinced that the Swedish
reasonableness is deeply defective, owing far too much to
inhibition and anxiety and emotional dissociation. To repress
anger as extensively as people do here greatly exceeds the
demands of justice and rational self-control; I find it little
short of pathological. The demand for repression seems to
arise from some naive misunderstanding or simplification of
what goes on between human beings: it's simply not true that
strong feelings escalate so inevitably into violence. And to
avoid confrontation and to repress disapproval to the extent
the Swedes do shades, rather often, into passivity and indif-
ferentism. For instance, I'm sure that it isn't only because of
the chronic shortage of labor that people rarely get fired
here, no matter how they bungle their jobs. It's also true that
most Swedes would prefer to continue operating some activity
with incompetent personnel than face the unpleasantness of
speaking severely to someone, hurting their feelings and in-
curring their hostility. One of the commonest repMes people
make when someone proposes doing something, or questions
why something is being done, is "Why not?" At first I found
that locution charming—a humorous way of saying yes. Soon
I realized that all too often that's precisely what they mean:
not a true yes, which depends on the abihty to say no, just
"why not?"
F COURSE, SWEDISH LIFE ISN'T ALWAYS like this. Such
O an uptight world has to have a safety-valve. Here
it's drink. Alcohol has the status in Sweden of a
mythic substance: the magic elixir that gives one
permission to release aggressions, allow intimacy. Though in
per capita consumption Sweden lags behind the United
States, France, and several other nations, the amount of
drinking the Swedes do looks pretty formidable, especially
because there's an established convention of drinking heavily
at meals (while bar drinking is fairly undeveloped); it's
common for a Swede to down a carafe of wine, several beers,
and at least one branvinn at dinner. Drinking is like going
abroad. "If only you could see him when he's had a few
drinks," I've been told often when I confessed to having
difficulty talking with someone. Liquor marks the biggest
difference between here and England, though the emotion-
fearing Swedes are often thought to resemble the English. On
the surface, they are less open and friendly than the English,
but ultimately, the Swedes are much less reserved. Only they
usually have to be drunk. Liquor is so important, so deeply
experienced a facility of psychic release, that even the under-
thirty generation in Stockholm, many of whom are heavy
users of hash or Preludin, rarely lose their attachment to
tripping out on alcohol (unlike drug users in the States), and
usually don't at all decrease their consumption of liquor.
Liquor releases one from the obligation of prudence, which
is a major theme of Swedish hfe. (A bus and billboard ad
around town this winter featured this stark copy over the
name of a bank: "Be careful with your money." Such an
advertising campaign to encourage people to patronize a
particular bank would, I think, be unlikely in any other
country.) People are quick with admonitions of prudence, such
as reproofs for financial extravagance (one rather well-off
Swede in his early twenties expressed surprise and mild
disapproval that I would spend 30 kronor—$6—apiece on
the tickets to the rock concerts), and comments on the
hazards of driving a car on a winter night. The basic poles of
Swedish behavior are: prudent, restrained versus dangerous,
prodigal. And the fundamental metaphor for that polarity is
sober versus drunk. Because of the high value placed on
restraint, there is a great fear of letting go—and, of course, a
vast craving to do just that. This ambivalence can surface at
unexpected moments. One recent instance: a conversation I
had with a bright undergraduate at the University of Uppsala,
40 miles northwest of Stockholm, where I was invited two
weeks ago for an evening by the student film club, in the
course of which I happened to mention that I loved Wagner.
She said she was shocked. Startled, I asked why—expecting
to hear about Wagner the proto-Nazi, the old trauma which
had kept me deaf to the Ring so many years. But no, not at
all. She disapproved because Wagner seduces; he's too emo-
tional, she explained; you can lose yourself in that music. I
would have been less than honest if I'd contradicted her. I
could only say that 1 didn't mind that, in fact thought it a
good thing now and then—an answer she didn't like at all. As
we talked, I remembered that Nietzsche had made the same
charge when he repudiated Wagner and his earlier Wagner
idolatry. Nietzsche was right, too. Still, it's one thing for a
Nietzsche, indeed for any German, to treat suspiciously the
opportunity for emotional debauch, quite another for puritan
Swedes, or English, or Americans, among whom I include
myself. The Swedes could use more emotion—a lot more, but
distributed much more evenly through the whole culture.
HE SWEDES WANT TO BE RAPED. (My problem here: I'm they do indeed have a liquor problem, but it's as much or
T temperamentally not a rapist.) And drink is their
national form of self-rape. Drunkenness is thus, by
definition, the national disgrace. Almost the whole
burden of guilt is linked to liquor, instead of—as in the rest
of Europe and the Americas—to sex. (Hence, their somewhat
misleading appearance of being sexually liberated.) The
stigma attached here to being an alcoholic is quite excru-
ciating. In 1914, climaxing the influence of a genuinely
popular temperance movement, advocating prohibition, a
system of rationing was introduced that restricted the pur-
chase of liquor to wage-earners over 25 (women without
incomes of their own and married women were not eligible);
ration books were issued, which allowed the holder to
buy only at his local store up to a maximum amount monthly
which varied between three and four quarts of hard liquor—
wines were not rationed but their purchase was registered.
This set-up lasted for 40 years, until rationing was ended
by national referendum in 1955, but the guilt hangover
is still strong. The very act of purchasing liquor retains a
definitely illicit quality for the Swedes, as any foreigner can skal itself that precedes the drink, a rite which requires gazing
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see who goes to shop in one of the state-owned liquor stores
today. Outside, these stores have no advertising or window
display, only a small, neutral sign flush with the building.
Inside, the atmosphere is part funeral parlor and part back-
street abortionist. In heavy silence and with eyes averted,
people line up before the counter, whisper their orders to the
poker-faced clerk. Some wine is usually displayed, but hard
liquor is kept under the counter or stacked on shelves; instead
of asking for a bottle by name, customers often use the number
by which it is listed in a catalogue. Waiting on line has the
furtiveness of queuing up for the peep-shows in the rear of the
42nd Street sexbook stores, with the risk of a similar chagrin
if you're spotted by a square friend or relative whose good
opinion you value. (Once when buying some wine I saw
someone I knew on the adjacent line—a kid who goes to
night high-school and supports himself by washing windows. I
said hello to him. He acted as if he didn't know me. Another
Swedish acquaintance, to whom I mentioned this puzzling
incident, thought it perfectly natural; the boy must have been
overcome with embarrassment, he said, because I had met
him in a liquor store.) Each customer receives the unholy
stuff' in brown or grey-green paper bags on which is sometimes
printed "Say no to liquor," or "It is a crime to give minors
hquor," and, head down, hurries out of the store. Of course,
everyone in Sweden recognizes those paper bags; strangers
glance knowingly at anyone carrying one and friends en-
countered on the way home will unfailingly make some joking
comment. To avoid this, many people, before leaving the
store, stuff" the paper bag under their coats or conceal it in a
briefcase or a large shopping bag. Needless to say, carrying
an unwrapped bottle of anything, even wine, on the street
is, though not illegal, the exact social and emotional equivalent
of taking down your pants in public in the States. If the display
of liquor in bottles is indecent exposure, actually drinking it
equals nakedness.
While Sweden does have an alcoholism problem (which has
increased again in the last 14 years, since rationing ended), it's
nowhere as grave as it is, say, in France, Ireland, or Russia.
But no other people has attacked the dangers of alcohohsm
with the punitive ferocity of the Swedes. The result is that
more a national neurosis about alcohol (which every Swede
shares) as it is the creeping psychosis and physical degeneration
caused by heavy alcohol consumption (which afflicts only a
minority of the population). Alcoholism feels much more
serious a problem here than in other and more drink-sodden
countries because of the enormous moral-psychic (or mythic)
weight of drink. In the matter of alcohol, every Swede is
guilty until proven innocent. I remember a dozen occasions
when people I know whose habitual intake of liquor is modest
by anybody's standards, even mine, have nervously assured
me and everyone else in the vicinity that they aren't alcohohcs,
the occasion being something like just having ordered a beer
with their lunch. At first it just seemed nutty, until I began to
grasp what lies behind that unnecessary disavowal from their
point of view—what liquor means here. Alcohol is not
primarily something for oneself. To take even one drink is a
quite literal signal to the others present, announcing that one
is about to become a different person: warmer, perhaps indis-
creet, a little aggressive. That metamorphosis begins with the
RAMPARTS 27
into the eyes of everyone at the table before and after the first
sip (after which everyone must briefly set down his glass).
IQUOR SEEMS TO INHIBIT PARANOIA. But it Only tem-
porarily and fitfully appeases the general mood here
of habitual suspicion of people, in the teeth of which
all ordinary transactions must be conducted, and
which shows up in many national tics. One is the mania the
Swedes have for locking things up. Churches are almost
always locked; everyone locks his car as a matter of course
even when stopping briefly on a country road or dropping in
on friends who live in a sedate residential street in the suburbs;
when I was editing my film in February and March, my cutter
locked the room where we were working on the fifth floor of
the Sandrew building whenever we went downstairs to the
third floor for a ten minute coff'ee break. This, in a country
which has (from an American perspective) a negligible crime
rate, and in which the standard of honesty among people in
work situations could scarcely be higher. Clearly, it's not
practically necessary to lock up on most of the occasions the
Swedes do it: it's rather a symbolic act, expressing and con-
firming irrational and irrepressible mistrust.
The same mistrust, I would guess, underlies Swedish be-
havior in the larger matters of hospitality and generosity.
While, in one sense, Swedes are among the most polite and
amiable people I have ever met, their politeness contains so
much anxiety—so much evident wish to appease, to head off'
real or imagined unpleasantness—it's hard fully to enjoy it.
And their politeness has great limits. The Swedes are not, for
instance, very generous. With rare exceptions, invitations to
have dinner in people's homes are restricted to relatives and
long-time friends; in this there is little diff'erence between
bohemia and bourgeoisie; another pattern appears only
among those, whether businessmen or artists, who have spent
a lot of time abroad. And the meals themselves are generally
less than ample. It's almost unheard of for one person to pay
the whole fare for a taxi ride two or three have shared and
uncommon for one person to take another to dinner; checks
are split pedantically when people eat out together. (The more
graceful method whereby I take the check this time and you
pay the next apparently entails too much trust. Safer to keep
accounts straight as one goes along.) When I was shooting
the film, I sometimes came near to losing my temper when an
actor or one of the crew—all people I'd become fond of, who
liked me, whom I spent every day with — would ask me if he
could borrow a cigarette, assuring me elaborately that when
he bought a pack at lunchtime he would return the one he was
taking now. (I saw the Swedes going through the same
number with each other, so the verbal ritual can't be explained
as courtesy to the foreigner or deference to the boss.) I had
my verbal ritual, too: saying "Please take as many as you
like, you don't have to ask," sometimes adding a sententious
remark on how such freedoms among friends and colleagues
go without saying in America. Ostentatiously, didactically, I
would lift cigarettes from the same guy's pack the next day
without asking. But it kept happening. Certain people, no
matter how often they come to my apartment, always ask
permission to make a phone call, use the bathroom, get a beer
from the refrigerator. Used to American, even more particu-
larly, California manners, I had to struggle not to feel a little
insulted when they didn't become freer with me. It took a
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while to see where they are (though I don't like it any better
than before): that the Swedes simply do find it hard to accept
generosity and to extend it. There is little hospitality compared
with most places in Europe, certainly far less than in America
and England. Many Swedes have told me that they feel uneasy
putting a friend up (one said he feared being exploited; he
always suspected that his guest could afford a hotel, and
stayed with him just to save money). In many families—
particularly among the bourgeoisie, and even more in the
country than the city—a guest is viewed as someone who
disrupts household order and compromises cleanUness, about
which the Swedes are just this side of obsessional. (When
entering someone's house or apartment during the winter, you
are often asked to leave your shoes at the doorway. Impossible
not to comply, even if it's demonstrably true that your shoes
aren't wet and you explain that because of the cold you'd
rather not walk around in your stockings or socks.) One
curious custom: it's expected that a house guest brings his own
sheets, pillowcases, and towels; and these are never supplied
when you rent an otherwise completely furnished apartment.
Sheets etc. are considered private articles, like underwear.
When I've mentioned this lack of hospitality to well-traveled
Swedes familiar with the standards current abroad, they be-
come defensive but in the end offer the same excuse—the
emotional climate which prevails here. One friend, who has
lived in Ibiza for two years, told me she loved putting up
friends from Sweden in her house there, but since her return
to Stockholm found herself now too emotionally blocked to
do it when Spanish friends visited or Swedish friends came
from out of town.
UT PERHAPS THE MOST OBVIOUS SYMPTOM of the Swedish
suspicion of people is simply the meagerness and
relative comfortlessness of institutionaUzed social
life. For a capital city of a million people, Stockholm
provides astonishingly few amenities for meeting in public. No
cafes, of course. It's too cold. Only some half dozen restau-
rants in the whole city stay open after ten o'clock, and none of
these after midnight. Probably the gayest space in Stockholm
is Grona Lund's Tivoli, an amusement park on one of the main
islands of the town, which has none of the fantasy or abandon
of its Copenhagen namesake but is a good deal more pleasant
than Coney Island or Luna Park today; anyone over twenty,
though, probably won't want to go back too often, and anyway
it's open only from April (when it's still quite cold) through
September. As for the rest of the nightlife, I can run down the
main places for you in a single long sentence. There is one
stuff'y nightclub (Berns) where international stars hke Miriam
Makeba perform, patronized by the middle-aged bourgeoisie;
dancing for the miniature jet set in an expensive, centrally
located hotel (the Strand); two discotheques {LordNilsson and
Number 1) off the main street, Kungsgatan, for lower-budget
swingers in their twenties and thirties; one big bare club with
occasional live rock {The Golden Circle) patronized mostly by
students; a cluster of small caves for teenagers in the Old
Town, some with live groups; a few boring, surprisingly shabby
and very expensive, private clubs that feature after-hours
drinking and roulette; one bar that is the showplace for
arrived intellectuals, artists, and with-it government people
{The Opera Bar), small, dull, but with handsome art nouveau
decor; one fairly tame, but crowded, private club for homo-
sexuals which allows dancing (the Cily Club), occupying the
ground floor and basement of an apartment building with no
name outside the building or on the entrance to the club
itself, open three nights a week until five a.m.; and some topless
places, with names like The Waikiki Club (most of these less
than a year old and without a liquor license), which are open
during the day, where one cup of cofi'ee costs four dollars, that
attract mainly foreigners and businessmen in from the prov-
inces. I've undoubtedly left out a few, but you get the idea. In
most of these places, the atmosphere is grim. Swedes not
drunk are often apathetic, and the music makes it hard for
anyone to talk. Drunk, they are not very graceful either, and
often not even loquacious. But, as a matter of fact, one doesn't
see many people drunk: hardly ever in restaurants; rarely in
the clubs and discotheques; occasionally on the streets and
in the subway, but then mostly just on Friday and Saturday
nights.
Street life itself in Stockholm is based on the principle of
avoidance. First rule: avoid being on the street unless neces-
sary. When a Stockholmer wants to take a walk, he doesn't
think of strolling in town, though many parts of the city, with
its dominant ochre, green, and tan stone buildings and
splendid views of the water, are beautiful; and the congestion
of automobile traffic is modest. Instead he goes to Djurgarden,
the big lovely park island which is part of the metropolitan
area, or out into the country. People one sees on the streets
in central Stockholm are there for business, and walk with a
rigid, brisk, no nonsense stride. One rarely sees children on the
street in town, and never any cats or dogs. (There are no
children at night in restaurants either: a considerable oppro-
brium attaches to bringing them out after what's considered
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to be a normal bed-time.) Second rule: if on the street, avoid
contact with other people. Amiable as the Swedes are privately,
street manners in Stockholm are atrocious. People bump into
you without apology—something I've seen in only one other
city, Athens, but there it was specifically men lurching into
women, an unmistakable, if coarse, gesture of flirtation. Here
people are not flirting. On the contrary, the accidental contact
of body to body is something embarrassing, mildly unpleasant
and best treated as if it had not happened at all. Of course, this
dreary system has its great advantages for minority groups
specially subject to street persecution, such as eccentrically
dressed youth, celebrities, and younger women. Stockholm
is probably the only capital where the Prime Minister could
ride to his office on the subway every morning (as Tage
Erlander did for many years) and never have anyone speak to
him, much less importune or insult him, though everyone
knows what he looks like. And I can't tell you how relieving,
liberating it is to be in a city where an unaccompanied woman
can walk around at any hour, day or night, and hardly ever
even be looked at, much less accosted or followed by men,
except if she wants to be. That's a liberty I've known so far
only in London. Stockholm, though, is much more extreme
and consistent than London. After ten p.m., if not earlier, on
an ordinary weekday, one can walk for blocks in the center
of town without seeing anyone else on the sidewalks, with
only an occasional car passing by.
'vE SAID THAT THE SWEDES FIND it hard to trust. What
comes to mind this moment is a conversation I once
had with someone which was precisely about the diffi-
culty of having conversations. This was mainly a ploy,
an attempt to get this guy to relax somewhat, to extend himself
a little bit. I wasn't interested in talking seriously about
talking; nor did I want anything intimate, in the way of
confidences or feelings, from this man. But he took me literally,
and jumped with a quite touching guilelessness to the heart
of the matter. He had assumed I did mean conversation in the
sense of intimate confidences, because his solemn answer to
my rather loose remark was: "Well, the reason I don't like to
talk is because I'm afraid that if I do confide in someone, he
might repeat what I've said to someone else the next day."
Sweden is the only country I know of where misanthropy
is a respectable attitude, one people at least avow often (how
deeply they mean it is another matter) and express sympathy
for. One Swedish acquaintance, a diplomat, told me I would
never understand Sweden until I grasped the concept of being
manniskortrott, tired of people. Swedes easily tire of other
human beings, he said. They need to get away. I replied that
I found what he was saying psychologically implausible. Don't
you ever get tired of people, he asked. I said I often craved
privacy, but that wasn't the same thing. The need for privacy
carries no implication of being tired of people; it just means
you want some more space for yourself. People are OK, I
concluded lamely. (I'd already had versions of this dispiriting
conversation with several other Swedes.) He looked at me as
if I were crazy, and muttered something about the childish
Rousseauistic optimism of Americans. That time I gave up. I
think, though, I do understand. Who wouldn't be misan-
thropic, if one's personal relations were habitually stifled,
loaded with anxiety, experienced as coercive. For most
Swedes, human "contact" is always, at least initially, a problem
—though in many cases, the problem can be solved, the
distance bridged. Being with people feels hke work for them,
far more than it does like nourishment. If it felt hke that to you
and me, I'm sure we'd have the need to get away and rest up as
often as possible, just as the Swedes do.
The counter-force to this misanthropy is the celebrated
Swedish love of nature. Though I'd heard about this before I
came here, still I've been amazed by the ardor with which
they talk about being alone in the remote countryside. ("Na-
ture" seems to be the only thoroughly respectable object of
passion in Swedish culture.) I remember the vehemence of a
fashionably dressed fortyish matron I talked to one afternoon
while we were both waiting on the line for taxis outside the
Central Station. I asked her if she lived in Stockholm. "Oh
no, of course not," she exclaimed. "I live in the country. I
could never live in Stockholm, though I hke to come in
occasionally to visit friends or see a play. But I couldn't bear
to see people all the time. I prefer nature." Hearing the cliche
so primly and starkly declaimed, I wondered for a second if
she were putting me on (as I thought when, not many years
ago, a New Englander said to me, "Some of my best friends
are Jews" and I laughed politely at what I took to be a rather
literary joke). But she wasn't. Large numbers of Swedes really
do have an extraordinary romance with nature. Many people
on all income levels in Stockholm and the other cities own a
small boat or a tiny house in the country or both. These are
as much a part of normal expectations in Sweden as a TV
and a car in the United States. (Of course, lots of Swedes have
these, too. One Swede in five owns a car—the highest ratio in
Europe: among other uses, they need the car to get to the boat
or the country house.) Though we would regard these as
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luxuries, the appurtenances of industrial affluence, many
Swedes treat them as necessities. Their rhythm demands the
withdrawal into nature, which house and boat make more
feasible. Nature means being as far from people as possible,
ideally far enough to be free of all traces of man—an easily
managed vacation goal in a nation so drastically underpopu-
lated. And of Swedish nature's two perspectives, the one
looking out from the nation's land space and the one which
turns inward toward its obscure internal spaces, sea and forest,
the emotional accent falls on the latter. Although more than
half of Sweden is bordered by the sea and Stockholm is itself
a collection of islands (so that anywhere in the city one is
only a few minutes' walk from water and a bridge) at the
dense end of a vast archipelago, wooded land and the remote
inner lakes supply the more profound and compelling ex-
perience of nature. The forest is not only a dominant physical
reality that covers more than half the land area of Sweden, but
a vital national metaphor. "To go to the forest" means to
vanish. "Get to the woods" means go to hell. The forest is a
kind of ideal landscape, whose authority for the spectator
has, so far as I can tell, little to do with the anemic idea that
nature is "beautiful." For the Swedes, nature is not an
aesthetic object, as it mostly is for us, but a healing environ-
ment or medium: impersonal, stable, dense but empty, both
threatening and yet (compared to human contact) enthralling
and revitahzing. While it would be presumptuous of me to
speculate much more about what kind of pleasures the Swedes
get from their solitary experiences with nature, I don't doubt
that many people here are quite dependent on them for their
psychic equilibrium.
Swedes often attribute the awkwardness and flatness of their
urban life to the fact that "we're stiU a country people, a nation
of peasants." Industrialization came late to Sweden; most of
the people in Stockholm (I'm told) still remember the forest,
and their surly manners are those of isolated farmers and
woodsmen, from which background also stems their lack of
talent for creating a minimally warm, gregarious urban
settlement. Even more common is explanation-by-Montes-
quieu: the weather. It's so cold, there's so little light. After
hearing this innumerable times, often delivered as a hesitant
bid for sympathy, I hardly know what to do with this theory
except to agree with it and ignore it. Of course, it's true. The
weather is dismal, peculiarly depressing: not so much the
cold, which is no more severe than Canada, as the absence
of light. For me, the weather explains nothing—and every-
thing. It might well make the Swedes a nation of chronic
depressives. (It seems just common sense that the psychiatric
division of Stockholm's Karolinska Hospital, Sweden's largest
medical facility, maintains a sanatorium for some of their
severely disturbed patients in sunny Spain.) But weather
doesn't explain the sub-paranoid strain in Swedish culture, the
polite suspicion that permeates all human contacts.
T
HE COST OF THAT MUTED AMBIANCE o f SUSpicion f o t t h e
Swedes seems very high. As with all deep moral
traits, it is blatantly inscribed on the bodies of the
Swedes—both expressing and powerfully reinforcing
their psychic bind. This is the origin of, and the mode of
perpetuating, the famous Swedish "clumsiness," a clumsiness
as much a physical fact as one of personal relations. It's true
that the Swedes are spectacularly good-looking, but a dis-
crepancy between beauty of face and unliberated body is
fairly common. The inhibition is less apparent in the body at
rest than in its pattern of movement: little mobility of the
head; inexpressive shoulders; locked pelvis; inflexible, too
erect carriage. The problem of the rigid body seems less acute,
and less prevalent, in women than in men, which is probably
why everyone praises the beauty of Swedish women more often
than of Swedish men—though for faces, I find the men even
better looking than the women. And yet most Swedes are in
exceptional physical health, as one can instantly observe by
their good complexions and by the paucity of people who are
overweight; and large numbers are addicted to exercise
(swimming, jogging, skiing, saunas are part of people's
ordinary lives well into their thirties) long past the age when
most middle-class Americans have settled for unbroken
sedentariness. How they manage to maintain their physical
stiffness against the trajectory of their good health and all
that exercise only testifies, I guess, to the force of the physical-
psychic inhibition. These stiff bodies are the perfect instruments
to act out the characteristic Swedish insensitivity to physical
presence. When someone shoves me accidentally while, say, we
are both struggling into heavy winter coats in the tiny foyer
of a restaurant, and doesn't look up, excuse himself, or
acknowledge what's happened in any way, I've wondered, did
he actually feel it? Maybe he didn't.
The physical inhibitedness of the Swedes is, I think, closely
connected with the spectacular pornography industry that
flourishes here. Everything you can imagine is legal and easily
available, at least in Stockholm. You can rent blue films by
the hour or day, and cheaply, by calling one of a number of
companies listed in the telephone directory; if you want a
dildo, you can buy one at your nearest sex store. But what's
interesting is not what you can find if you look or ask, but
what you can't avoid seeing. Amazing color close-ups of
mouth-genital acts are on display a few inches away at eye
level as you buy a paper at a sidewalk kiosk in downtown
Stockholm or pay for your cigarettes over a tobacconist's
counter. It seems to me not only that this casualness curiously
de-eroticizes pornography, but that such a profusion of
pornographic images is unlikely to arise except in a culture
so anesthetized sensorially that people literally don't react
to the images. For that's exactly what happens here. People
walk along the street and don't look at all. If you see a few
people standing in front of a kiosk or a sexbook display
window, they are most likely foreigners. I have thought of
Japan, another nation with a pornography industry compar-
able to Sweden (and rather like Sweden in its cultural thematics
of prudence and formality versus the casting off of restraints,
sobriety versus drunkenness). But Japanese pornography, what
I've seen of it, seems very different: much more robust, more
playful, more involving, and often compatible with, instead
of destructive of, romantic feeling. Of course, the Japanese
benefit from a tradition of erotic art—books and woodprints
and illustrated sexual manuals—that is centuries old, while
Swedish pornography in its present form is very young. Por-
nography in Sweden, which went completely public only
around five years ago, via a breakthrough film (Bergman's
The Silence) and a book of erotic stories written for the occa-
sion by established authors {Kdrlek I—Love /—published in
1964; the series is now up to Kdrlek XII), has a quahty for
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which the kindest word would be primitive. Have you had
the patience yet to stand on line to see I am Curious! I hesitate
to urge it on you, but should you be feeling in a sociological
mood, the film will give you a good whiff of Sweden. Hardly
the whole reality, but some of the characteristic deficiencies:
the lack of personal sophistication and finesse, the emotional
naivete, the childish self-centeredness, the anti-erotic character
of many people here.
Official sexual "policy," of course, is admirably enlightened.
Sex education has been compulsory in the schools, starting in
the fourth grade, since 1955; in some city schools ninth graders
are taken to visit birth-control centers to learn contraceptive
techniques; condoms are sold in automatic vending machines
on the streets and in men's rooms in restaurants and other
public places. Sexual relations between teen-agers are taken
for granted and don't have to be hidden, even in conventional
bourgeois families (I've read that 43 per cent of women are
pregnant on their wedding day); all university dormitories
are coed. Not only is no stigma attached to being a bastard,
but it is rather chic in the younger cosmopolitan set for a
couple with one or two children not to get married. One of
the biggest papers here, Expressen, carries a plain-spoken
column written by a Danish couple giving advice and informa-
tion on sexual matters, which encourages people to experiment
with different positions and preaches tolerance for erotic
minorities; "Sten and Inge" have become household names
in Sweden (as they are in Denmark), the Dr. Spock of the
Scandinavian bedroom. The Swedes are curious, no doubt of
that. But they aren't very sensitive to what kind of images
and situations are erotically exciting. The aptly named / am
Curious quite exactly, and unintentionally, conveys the sexually
underdeveloped atmosphere here, which is if anything rein-
forced by the pornography industry. I doubt that pornography
is turning any Swedes on to sex. Its prevalence seems rather
one more barrier to eroticism, one more hurdle the Swede has
to jump before he can be fully inside his own feelings, his own
skin. So far as one can distinguish between pornography that
degrades sexual feeling and pornography that stimulates and
enhances it, what the Swedes have around belongs mostly
to the first type. All those medium shots of women with
their legs spread in the dozens of monthly photo magazines
decorating the kiosks seem like illustrations for some mad
gynecologist's encyclopedia, whose only service could be to
cure a few people's anatomical ignorance. Such images are
numbing to men, I imagine, and experienced as demeaning
by women. I don't mention this last only because it's been my
own reaction, but because these images so patently subvert
the public commitment of the Swedes to be more sensitive
than other people to the task of conferring dignity and genuine
liberty to women. (I should add that many Swedes I know
have voiced the same objection to these images.) The best
use that the Swedes have made of their freedom to manufacture
and multiply pornographic imagery is as something aggressive,
dropping all pretense to being sexually inviting. Pornographic
cartoons and drawings are a regular feature in many of the
flourishing number of informally-produced Left magazines
and pamphlets. Though my own taste in the genre of radical
political pornography runs to something wittier, less strident
—like the pioneering (for us) fantasies of Paul Krassner in
The Realist—much of the Swedish work, particularly a
monthly called Puss (Kiss), is clever and on target.
RAMPARTS 31
 WEDiSH PORNOGRAPHY IS, OF COURSE, just onc expression
of a culture deeply ambivalent about the fulfillment of
its sensuality. (I wonder how many of the radicals who
criticize the puritanism of socialist countries are as
struck by the anti-erotic character of advanced, permissive
capitalist society.) Another is the mediocre food people put
up with: pallid overcooked vegetables, thin slices of well-done
meat buried in gravy, the abominable korv (sausage) which
is, in countless varieties, the national dish. Some of the food
is good: particularly the fish, usually fresh and not too much
interfered with in cooking, the many kinds of herring (if you
like herring), the ritual Thursday night pancakes and pea
soup with pork, and the famous krdftor (a kind of crayfish)
that comes into season in August and is the occasion for two
weeks of collective national hysteria in the form of krdftor
parties at which people eat with their hands, get drunk, wear
little party hats, and throw paper streamers at each other. But
these are the peaks of a generally unsensuous diet and ex-
perience of food. Swedes command nothing like the Slavic
appetite, and eat a good deal less than Americans do and
with less gusto than. most other European peoples. One
contradiction, though, to this low order of sensuality in
Sweden is the refinement and grace of manufactured things,
particularly domestic artifacts (a feature of life here shared
with the other Scandinavian countries and with Finland,
which currently sets the vanguard standards). The level of de-
sign in clothing, furniture, and kitchenware is high; "Swedish
modern" reflects ordinary taste here, not just that of sophisti-
cated consumers. Small details are introduced into public
spaces for no other reason than to afford visual pleasure, like
the unobtrusive relief images placed randomly at child's
eye-level on the pillars along the platform of one Stockholm
subway station. Unlike Americans, Swedes care about the
cumulative depression which comes from inhabiting a material
environment that doesn't gratify, or positively off"ends, the
senses. I've read that in the big iron-ore mine at Kiruna, in
the far north, the walls of each new tunnel are whitewashed
as soon as it is bored.
Sweden, with the striking unanimity of its people in body
type and sensibility, is the antithesis of a melting-pot. The
country has never been conquered by a foreign power, and
while one-fourth of the population left, mostly for the States,
during the last four decades of the 19th century, up to World
War II Sweden attracted few tourists and a tiny number of
foreign immigrants. Even today, with substantial tourism, with
the postwar invasion of American cultural imagery, and with
close to a half million non-Swedes living here (foreigners, half
from Finland and the rest mainly from Southern Europe, now
make up over five per cent of the labor force), the essential
homogeneity of Swedish life seems undisturbed. But possibly
because of their historical and geographical isolation and the
lack of internal cultural diversity, Swedes have, compared with
many other European peoples, a relatively weak drive toward
differentiation as individuals, which is not compensated for by
participation in organic structures of community. Individuality,
regarded as a value in itself, is the preeminent form of high-
voltage energy available in capitalist society. With their limited
appetite for individuality, and untouched or unpersuaded by
another valid formation of persons (such as those pre-capitalist
or socialist society provides), the Swedes appear to be function-
ing with a deficit of energy. And the center of Swedish intensity.
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"nature," is not one which returns people to social life (the
kind led here) with an increased vitality, but rather keeps them
in a state of chronic psychic and communal alienation.
ERHAPs IT'S JUST THIS DEGREE of alienation that has
enabled Sweden to develop a society more egalitarian
than any other operating within the framework of
capitalism. The country is, for instance, virtually
servantless, to a much greater extent than England, the United
States, Australia, and Canada. That affluent people can't,
probably shouldn't, employ domestic help has been accepted
with surprising grace. (I say surprising because, after all,
Sweden is a rich country whose citizens are constantly being
addressed and solicited as free-lance consumers—with ubi-
quitous commercial advertising, etc.—and are far from the
stage of becoming disillusioned with or critical of the value
of private material acquisition.) The few rich families who do
keep one maid often act embarrassed about it, or have partly
lost the art of giving orders and letting themselves be waited
on. As it becomes increasingly hard to recruit Swedes into
service jobs, conversion to self-service facilities in stores, hotels,
gas stations, and cheaper restaurants multiplies. In Stockholm
most waiters are Yugoslavs and Italians, but the foreigner-as-
servant also embarrasses many Swedes because foreigners talk
too loudly, don't bathe daily, are impolite to women on the
street, and may not be honest. The Swedes rarely show any of
these feelings, of course. (The Southern Europeans, on their
side, find the Swedes unbearably cold, stiff", and priggish; and
despite those high wages paid unskilled work for which they
emigrated, frequently are unable to stand it here.)
Though they lack candor and try to remain masked, Swedes
have a genuine gift for democratic manners. At work, the
Swedes, unlike the Germans and Japanese, tend to treat
superiors with little show of deference, no more or less infor-
mally than they do peers and subordinates. Their style is rather
American, except that they're far more polite and rarely
vulgar. That one person is older than someone else is also
rarely used to create situations of inequality. Indeed, in certain
arts and professions there is now a thriving prejudice in favor
of youthful candidates as such over talented and well-trained
people whose misfortune it is to be forty or older. (Observing
so many Swedes in their early or middle twenties filling impor-
tant decision-making roles in TV, movies, theatre, journalism,
law, business, and government reminds me that in the United
States, people are considered young and still promising at
forty, and, with a few exceptions, not trusted with large
executive power until their fifties and sixties. For all its flattery
of youth in the prevailing norms of family life and education
and in the content of the media, America is a country in which
almost all real power is wielded by the very old.)
Probably the most celebrated of all the egalitarian projects
undertaken by Swedish society concerns the situation of
women. Equality between the sexes, as a matter of tone in the
society, is much more advanced here than in the States. For
instance, many of the rituals of male gallantry that demean,
coddle, and patronize women have dropped out of public
relations between the sexes. All the major social and economic
agents in Sweden officially support the policy of opening more
jobs to women, particularly those from which they've tradi-
tionally been excluded. In the late 1950's the State Lutheran
Church began ordaining women pastors; more than 75 per
cent of crane operators are women now, as are a fair number
of drivers of busses, subways, and taxis; the Swedish Air Force
recently announced that it will begin recruiting women pilots.
People here have at least got the idea that sexual stereotyping
is both vulgar and unjust, so that it has almost vanished from
the conversation of those who regard themselves as civilized, as
well as from public oratory and even from some journalism.
Take my own experience. Sweden is probably the only country
in Europe or the Americas where I could spend all the months
it takes to make a movie without ever once having it called to
my attention by anyone, not even with a single remark or
nuance of behavior, that I was not afilmdirector but a woman
film director. (Needless to say, the liberation of Swedish
women, and therefore of Swedish men, has far to go. Though
in theory they can enter any occupation they choose at equal
pay and with equal chances for advancement, in fact Swedish
women are not all that numerous in the professions and
occupy an insignificant number of positions of economic and
political power. Only 14 per cent of the members of Parliament
are women, for example. Also, given the unavailability of
domestic help and the insufficiency of public facilities for child
care, the practical obstacles to mothers of small children
working full-time are perhaps even greater here than in the
States.)
HIS IS BOTH AN ACUTELY MATERIALISTIC SOCiety and,
reinforced by full employment and the most compre-
hensive network of social benefits of any capitalist
country, a fairly uncompetitive one—uncompetitive
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without being genuinely cooperative or spontaneously com-
munal. Like the Germans, Swedes are devoted to rules and
get rattled by disorder: old ladies glare at you if you cross an
empty street against the light, someone with whom you share
an office may well reproach you if you don't hang your coat
on the same peg every day. Union rules can prevent people
from working overtime, so that, for instance, a bookstore can't
get permission to stay open after 6 p.m., no matter how much
the owner is willing to pay his clerks. Ushers in the big theatres
will refuse to let you be seated if you haven't first checked
your coat; it isn't optional, and there are no exceptions. But
for all their compulsion to abide by rules, the Swedes seem
considerably less efficient than the Germans, the Japanese, cer-
tainly than the Americans. One cause of the inefficiency, which
I've already mentioned, is that hardly anyone gets fired. Even
cabinet ministers do not resign when their departments commit
some basic error of policy or administration. (Because honesty
is assumed, no one is likely to suspect corruption as the ex-
planation of an inept performance.) Often people don't feel
called on even to apologize or express regret for poor work
when it is pointed out to them. Another cause is a widespread
reluctance to take the initiative. The average Swede prefers to
follow instructions, though people who like to give them are
rare here, or to decide things in a committee. Collective deci-
sions, naturally, take some time to reach—not just because
committees are like that, but because of the value Swedes set
on compromise. As conversations here are seldom argumenta-
tive, since speakers tend either to accept each other's views or
keep quiet if they disagree, decisions tend to be deferred until
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familiarity has stripped them of any appearance of ruthlessness.
While sometimes Swedish inefficiency appears to resolve back
into a symptom of insufficient energy, there's more to the
phenomenon. Swedes do in fact feel ambivalent about effi-
ciency. They shun it, fearing that it nourishes competitiveness.
(So it does, in capitalist society.) And they admire it. A number
of times I've heard two Swedes remarking to each other, some-
what bemusedly but with definite approval, that so-and-so is
very "professional" at his job, referring to occupations where
I'd have thought that would be taken for granted. As I've
discovered, it isn't here. When I asked a young lawyer I know
to explain the basis of the fortune of the Wallenbergs, the
richest and most powerful family in the country, his prompt
answer was, "They're the most efficient and business-like.
They'll fire anyone who doesn't do his job right." What I'd
been asking, of course, was which industries and natural
resources the Wallenbergs control.
Swedish inefficiency is not at all like the notorious muddle
of Mediterranean countries, which reflects a high incidence of
personal corruption, a weak work ethic, and a hypertrophy of
bureaucratic structures. It's obvious that lots of work gets done
in Sweden—how else could such prosperity be created?—but
by a different, slower clock than Americans use. Swedes are
good at making things: there is a superb level of craftsmanship
here, an enthusiastic pedantry of the object. But the level drops
when people have to be added in. Swedes are unreliable, for
instance, about answering letters or returning calls. Though
they are invariably punctual for appointments, a kind of
unconscious inner resistance frequently operates in making
appointments at all. The reply to "Let's have dinner next
Wednesday" is often "I'll let you know on Monday," and
there's a fair chance of not getting any word on Monday—
and at the next encounter, no allusion to the fact that a dinner
together had been planned.
T«i' T MUST BE BECAUSE SWEDES FIND IT EASIER t h a n d o mOSt
i l people not to heat up when discussing controversial
I (i.e. important) subjects or confronting practical emer-
t gencies that they make good mediators and international
diplomats, as everyone says. However anxiety-ridden they
may be, they are specialists in the art of appearing—by silence,
by lack of color and gesture when they talk—impervious to
many ordinary pressures, incapable of being shocked. The
stolid, unflappable air of many people here reproduces in
miniature a characteristic quality and a basic world-historical
posture of the country as a whole. For all its innovative daring,
Swedish society projects a strong and convincing appearance
of stability, settledness. Genuine risk-taking (more exactly, the
consciousness of taking a risk) is incompatible with the con-
viction that one is entirely safe. And that's what the Swedes do
feel. Their profound feeling of safety, institutionalized in the
security net spread for every citizen within the country's
borders, owes first of all to the fact that the Swedes have
managed to stand aside from the principal melodramas and
tragedies of modern history: through luck, an ingenious
contrapuntal mix of international friendships defined as an
official policy of non-alignment (Sweden has joined no formal
alliances since the Congress of Vienna of 1814-15), and keeping
their cool. One friend told me, mixing mild self-mockery with
frankness, "You know, when I go abroad I always feel safe,
34 RAMPARTS
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wherever I am, just because I'm a Swede." But that safety also
means that everything which happens abroad seems, from
here, remote and a little unreal. One gets the bad news, but
the emotion is defused by the fact of being in Sweden. I
remember that last August 21st, when the Russians invaded
Czechoslovakia, my first thought, after the initial moment of
shock and tears, was to wish I were in New York right then,
where I would feel so much nearer to Prague. Just seeing the
front pages of the newspapers filled every day with Swedish
news only—except for superevents, like Kennedy murders
and Kennedy remarriages—makes every big international
event seem far away.
To tell you something about local politics, I have to start at
the beginning, with the ruling Social Democratic Party. At
the time of its founding in 1899, the great majority of its
members were trade unionists, among them a core of Marxists
committed to the analytical and tactical perspective of class
warfare. But this element of the leadership lost out in the
newly formed party, whose chief aim, to stimulate the growth
of the trade unions, was instead pursued, and successfully
so, by preaching class solidarity. This ideology was further
consoUdated by the decision of the unions in 1898 to set up a
separate central body to handle their own affairs, which they
called Landsorganisationen i Sverige ("The Nationwide Or-
ganization in Sweden"), popularly known as the LO. After
the businessmen and industrialists formed their "union"—
the SAP—in 1902, relations between labor and capital (in-
cluding bargaining for wages, the use of the strike) have been
coordinated from the top and tend to be nationwide actions.
Most Swedish industrial workers still belong to the LO, though
it has some competition from two smaller unions formed in the
Depression years: the TCO, mainly white collar workers and
the more skilled industrial craftsmen, and the SACO, pro-
fessionals and academics. The Social Democrats have been the
largest party in Parliament since 1917. Although many pre-
dicted that they wouldfinallylose their majority in the election
of last September, in fact their vote increased—from 43 per
cent to 51 per cent. The next biggest party, the Center Party,
whose main constituency is farmers, trailed with 18 per cent,
while both the Right Party (just what it sounds like) and the
Liberals got 15 per cent of the vote. The Social Democratic
Party still interlocks with the LO in many ways (for instance,
most union locals collectively affiliate their membership to the
party) as well as with the Cooperative Union, the KF, founded
in 1899 and the third principal element of the official power
structure. But—and this is the main point—at no time was
the Social Democratic Party ever committed to revolutionary
socialism; Marxist influence in the trade union movement has
always been marginal; and the innumerable retail trade enter-
prises run by the KF aren't socialist cooperatives but a form
of public-spirited commercial development oriented toward
both profit and "consumer education." Ninety-one per cent of
the economy lies in private hands, and the growth rate of the
five per cent which the government owns lags way behind that
of the private sector. (Cooperatives own the remaining four per
cent.) Certainly Sweden is not a socialist country, though—
to my surprise—one hears many people here assert that it is.
Rather, it's an intelligent, relatively humanely managed
capitahst country which doesn't permit anyone who lives here
to be poor (through individual subsidy and insurance pro-
grams, and many free services) and also puts some obstacles
 in the way of being very rich (taxes start at 10 per cent but
rise steeply, with few loopholes, to 80 per cent), though not
insuperable ones. But it apparently makes people more
amiable, comfortable, secure to think of the country as social-
ist. The real content of the term socialist for the average Swede
is the denial of class conflict, which is to say, the affirmation
ofthe status quo.
"Socialism" is a comprehensive anti-ideological ideology,
concealing and neutralizing all genuine ideological strife and
struggles for power. (The description of Sweden as a country
with a socialist government functions similarly to the self-
identification of most Americans, whatever their income and
social situation, as "middle class.") It is, perhaps, as pretty
an instance of false consciousness as you could find. I have
heard many quite intelligent Swedes insist to me that there are
no social classes here—despite the ownership of most of
Sweden's resources, banks, and large-scale manufacture by a
few families; and the patently weighty role of the bourgeoisie
and still strong credibility of bourgeois values.
Probably just as many people regarded the country as
socialist in the 1930's, when a small but vocal Nazi party
existed here, and during World War II, when (I'm told) at
least half the population was pro-German, as do today. Still, it
seems scarcely imaginable now that much of the country was
in that mood only a few decades ago. For what's most striking
to an American here is the ubiquity and immense respectabil-
ity of left-liberal ideas. A poll nearly two years ago indicated
that 80 per cent of the population condemns the American
aggression against Viet-Nam. Scathing attacks on the church,
the institution of the family, the collaboration of Swedish
industry with imperialism abroad are a staple of TV debate
and newspaper articles. Decorating one of Stockholm's main
subway stations (Ostermalm, the city's Silk Stocking district)
is a frieze of imagery and lettering that could fill a graphics
supplement to Liberation: the Aldermaston symbol set at
intervals on the floor; sandblasted into the walls, sketches of
ecstatic figures with clenched fists or open arms, heads with
the look of having been flayed by suffering, interspersed with
several bars of the Internationale, the word Peace in a dozen
languages, slogans denouncing nuclear weapons and the use
of pesticides, and a smorgasbord of resonant names, including
Fanon, Sartre, and Brecht, as well as Virginia Woolf, Einstein,
etc. The remarkable decor of this public space is the work of
Siri Derkert—an artist in her seventies also famous here as
one of the first Swedish feminists, a bohemian, and a pacifist—
commissioned by the city authorities. To find such art in a
subway station is startling, but the Stockholmers don't seem
surprised by it at all. The ideas and attitudes of, say, The
Village Voice, are "establishment" opinions—expressed daily
in Dagens Nyeter, the country's equivalent to the New York
Times, and on the government-owned TV. Even further left
(by American standards) of Dagens Nyeter is another of Stock-
holm's four daily papers, Aftonbladet, owned by the LO, which
carries a regular Sunday column by Goran Palm, one of
Sweden's best younger poets and perhaps the most intelligent
of the new radical social critics. (There is one conservative
paper in Stockholm, Svenska Dagbladet, as well as one in
Goteborg and in Uppsala, which while not exactly supporting
U.S. policy, do not attack it.) Not only in matters of social
criticism and political innovation but in the arts as well, a
comparably advanced perspective rules: what educated
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Americans consider vanguard theatre, films, poetry, and paint-
ing is mainstream here. Sweden's one first-class international
celebrity in the arts, Ingmar Bergman, is subject to an amount
of disparagement here as an old-fashioned, irrelevant, and
reactionary artist that would astonish his admirers abroad.
Recently, Bergman knocked down the drama critic of Dagens
Nyeter at an open rehearsal of his excellent new production
of Wozzeck at the Royal Dramatic Theatre because this critic
—who is, remember, the equivalent of Clive Barnes—has for
some time been arguing that good Swedish theatre today
exists only in the equivalent of oR'-off'-Broadway here. (Berg-
man's tantrum, of course, fascinated and titillated the Swedes,
and was the top headline in the papers for days.) For at least
two years, the prestige critics test every new movie, theatre, and
play production for its radical political engagement.
ow IMPORTANT OR WEIGHTY the left-liberal senti-
ments here are, for all their ubiquity, is the big
question. Marcuse's repressive tolerance is often
invoked by "New Left" Swedes. And so far as the
policy of tolerance is a self-protective reaction against violence
—divesting unsettling or subversive ideas by ingesting them—
Sweden is a perfect case of the tolerant society. Still, it seems
a little forced to view the Swedish power structure as, con-
sciously or in fact, that manipulative. My impression is that
the ruling class of this country is genuinely benevolent and
filled with good intentions. The vision of a conflictless society
is authoritative here, and deep rooted—so much so that it is
extremely difficult for the constituency of radical movements
to get a purchase on any domestic issues. The energies of the
"New Left" are fed almost exclusively by their concern with
the international situation.
The catalyst, of course, was Viet-Nam. The first session of
the Russell Tribunal, held here in April-May 1967, helped
many people to take a stand, though the event was not given
much play in the press or on TV. Around the Viet-Nam issue
a number of groups have sprung into being, the most im-
portant of which are the "NLF Committees," the "Swedish
Vietnam Committee," and the "Young Philosophers." The
Swedish Vietnam Committee, the most "liberal," i.e. respect-
able and centrist of the three, is an umbrella organization (like
our National Mobilization) encompassing several tendencies;
Gunnar Myrdal is one of many big names who have been
active in it. It was the SVC which organized that huge demon-
stration in Stockholm in January 1968, at the head of which
the number two figure in the government, Olof Palme, marched
alongside the North Vietnamese ambassador to Moscow who
was visiting at the time; in reply to this affront to the United
States, Ambassador Heath (replaced last summer) was recalled
to Washington for several months. The Young Philosophers, in
contrast to the SVC, involves mostly people in their twenties
and early thirties; it was started in autumn 1965 by Ake
Lofgren, a philosophy teacher at the University of Stockholm.
He and his students began discussing Viet-Nam from a
"moral-political" point of view, then branched out to form
groups to discuss other issues such as China, U.S. foreign
policy, black power, etc. Eventually their activity expanded
into publishing a paper called For Vietnam (which doesn't
exist now) and short monographs, holding seminars in Stock-
holm and other cities, visiting schools in the country to give
lectures and conduct discussions. While Lofgren is no longer
RAMPARTS 35
active, the movement (they claim to be not an "organization")
remains in the hands of graduate students, ex-students, and
young academics; among the leading members now are Eric
Ericsson, who edits their monthly magazine Kommentar, and
Bengt Liljenroth. Working from a four-room office in Stock-
holm (address: Drottninggatan 13), which has an excellent
library of political books, documents, and periodicals in many
languages, perhaps ten people are involved full-time, thirty
part-time, and several hundred for more sporadic work. Unlike
the Young Philosophers, whose avowed program is to unite
knowledge and engagement, their emphasis being on discus-
sion and gathering information, and who have moved from
Viet-Nam to other international issues, the NLF Committees
are an agit-prop formation, exclusively concerned with the
Viet-Nam war and its implications. They have been the most
militant and hard-working of all the groups; they are in the
streets, building demonstrations, standing on corners to collect
money (they have sent over 1,200,000 kronor—$240,000—
to the NLF), and sell their newspaper, the Vietnam Bulletin.
Their members include both students and workers. The only
important intellectual figure of the Swedish New Left who's
well-known abroad, Jan Myrdal, the author of Report from a
Chinese Village and Confessions of a Disloyal European, is
associated with them. Another ally is Sweden's most celebrated
living novelist, Sara Lidman, who several years ago gave up
writing novels, enrolled at the University of Stockholm to
study economics, and now devotes her time to political writing
and speaking in factories. (Sara Lidman and Peter Weiss are
two senior writers here who experienced a dramatic conversion
to radical politics about five years ago, and were the first
important public voices raised over the Viet-Nam war; around
February 1965, they both began writing about it in the Swedish
papers. In October 1965 Lidman went to North Viet-Nam, and
the following year published a book called Conversations in
Hanoi. Weiss delayed his visit until after the completion and
premiere of his long historical documentary play Vietnam
Discourse last year; he spent six weeks last April and May
in Hanoi and has since published a book on Vietnamese
culture.)
If recently the energies of the younger Left have drained out
of the Viet-Nam issue, it is understandable. The movement
has been an amazing success. It has spearheaded a decisive
shift in Swedish public opinion and in the highest government
circles, made official by the government's decision this March
to establish diplomatic relations with the DRV (which means
trade and economic aid to the Vietnamese). This, the biggest
and most tangible result of the activities of the Swedish New
Left, probably signals the end of the Viet-Nam movement as
Such. After all, what more could the present government be
pressured into doing? Sweden already receives American de-
serters—although with some reluctance. As of April 15th, 204
deserters had been granted oflScial permission to stay in the
country (twice the number announced the same month by the
Pentagon); at least another hundred are waiting for their
applications for asylum to be processed. And an embargo
on the sale of armaments to the United States has been in
effect for several years. (This decision, however, didn't indicate
a specific disapproval of the war on Viet-Nam. Although
Sweden is an important manufacturer of small arms, the
government forbids their export to any country at war:
Sweden's schizophrenic neutralism. Bofors can sell guns
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abroad but only when the purchasers aren't actually—or too
conspicuously—using them.)
iTH THE GRADUAL WANING OF Viet-Nam activities,
much of the New Left's energy has recently turned
to Africa. The focus of the campaign is the news
that Asea, an electronics firm which is one of
Sweden's largest companies, has contracted to help build a
hydroelectric plant in Mozambique that will give a major
economic boost to the colonial regime and to Rhodesia as
well. Busloads of students from the universities of Uppsala
and Stockholm have gone up several times to demonstrate
before the big Asea plant in Vasteras; hundreds of street
posters denouncing Asea suddenly appeared some weeks ago
in Stockholm, Goteborg and Malmo; there are new photo-
exhibits, lectures, and pamphlets on the subject of Portuguese
coloniahsm. For more than a month, in a "theatre boat"
docked off one of the central islands of the town, a young
acting company has given free performances of their own play
about Angola from noon to two p.m. daily, while continuing
to perform other people's plays and charge for admission
in the evenings.
The black liberation struggle in the States is another
movement followed with intense interest by the young Left.
Bobby Seale, James Forman, and (in another incarnation)
Stokely Carmichael have all been here more than once and
talked at the Cafe Marx, several bare rooms off the rear court-
yard of an old building which is the closest Stockholm comes
to a radical political club. It's no cafe, but at one of the scarred
wooden tables you can actually get a real argument going over
a v/arm coke or a cup of instant coffee. Free Huey! and other
films on the Panthers played this winter to capacity audiences
at the Swedish Film Institute's cinematheque and at Puck,
Stockholm's one independent "art" theater (almost all the
cinemas in Sweden are owned by SF or Sandrew, the two
major film companies). Another set of activities has been
sparked by the presence of Andreas Papandreou, who heads
the tiny community of Greek political exiles living here now.
During the last year leaflet campaigns have been mounted to
give Swedes a bad conscience about taking their vacations in
a Greece ruled by the junta, demonstrations held in front of
the Greek tourist office, and articles written in the newspapers
urging the government to press for the expulsion of Greece
from such international bodies as the Council of Europe.
There is also a fair amount of awareness of the American
counter-insurgency operations in Bolivia and Guatemala. In
short, energies are being scattered—perhaps in order to re-
group. But at the moment, the Swedish New Left no longer
has a unifying cause. The biggest new focus, the liberation
struggle in Angola and Mozambique, seems somewhat arbi-
trarily chosen. The Asea affair is, if not a pretext, a mainly
symbolic (i.e. educational) issue. Of course, Asea's argument
is that, being a mere ten per cent of the consortium of foreign
companies building the hydroelectric plant, construction is
unlikely to be affected, much less halted, if they bow to the
pressure and give the contract up.
The fact is that the New Left is much clearer about foreign
struggles in which Swedish complicity with the wrong side is
marginal, if it exists at all—imperialism is the name of the
enemy—while the radical discussion of domestic issues remains
largely paralyzed. However, the best voices of the New Left—
such as Sara Lidman and Goran Palm—are aware of this
 one-sided development. Palm's first book, An Unjust Sermon
(1966), treated Sweden's relations with other countries, attack-
ing Sweden's neutralism as a hypocrisy in the light of its
economic interests in South Africa, India, and the Portuguese
colonies. But Palm's second book. Indoctrination in Sweden
(1968), treats an internal disgrace—unmasking, with great
originality, the education for capitalist values contained in the
textbooks used in the state school system.
What passes for an Old Left here has a much better eye for
injustices existing within Swedish society, unattached to any
foreign policy issue. The head of the Communist Party since
the early 1960's, C. H. Hermansson, is widely regarded as the
most intellectually solid thinker in Swedish politics today. His
book about the Swedish oligarchy. The Fifteen Families (1966),
created a stir and was discussed respectfully by leading figures
in the Social Democratic Party. Right now the Parliament is
debating what could be the first step toward setting a maximum
income: freezing for a trial period of one year the salaries of
everyone currently earning more than 40 thousand kronor—
$8000. Predictions are that such a law won't be passed in this
session but it is not an unlikely development. (Expropriation,
however, is an idea quite outside the present framework of
Swedish democracy. Nobody anticipates a Swedish govern-
ment posing any problems for the country's largest income
earner, seventy-nine-year-old Jacob Wallenberg, the elder of
two financier brothers, who makes more than $300,000 an-
nually and whose capital is said to exceed $11 million.)
The credibility of Hermansson's intelligence has helped to
strengthen the ruling party, by making the Social Democrats
a little bolder, but has inadvertently weakened his own. The
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Communists suffered a critical defeat last September 15,
dropping from a vote of eight per cent in the previous election
to three per cent and losing five of their eight parliamentary
deputies. The defeat is generally attributed to backlash from
the unanimous public revulsion against the invasion of Czecho-
slovakia, although Hermansson vehemently denounced the
Soviet government's action. But the real trouble is that the
CP is not attracting new adherents. Most young radicals
dismiss the Swedish CP—unfairly, I think—as merely a re-
formist group engaged in the parliamentary game, another
social democratic party in disguise. By the standards of active
revolutionary socialism, this is correct—but less because of
its devotion to electoral politics than because the Swedish CP
has no loyalties to any faction of the international communist
movement. (Before the party went "revisionist" under Her-
mansson, it was pretty steadily in Moscow's bag.) The purely
national character of the Swedish CP was underlined when, in
May 1967, the word Left was added to the party's name. (It's
now officially the Left Communist Party); and some people
here anticipate a second step, which will be to drop the word
Communist. But attempts to form a new "Marxist-Leninist"
CP have been avoided. At the moment the Left here is in a
familiar state of fission. By the way, there is Uttle organized
contact, so far as I can tell, with the American deserters. This
probably is partly caused by the notorious Swedish shyness,
reinforced by the gap between hesitant Swedish manners and
those of the young, agitated ex-GI's. Understandably, the
deserters tended to stay within their own community—now
split into at least two factions, one more consciously political
than the other.
•
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I
'VE GIVEN YOU ONLY A FEW DETAILS, a very incomplete
sketch, of the political situation, but enough—I h o p e -
to suggest the paradox I see here. The atmosphere seems
highly politicized: an increasing number of younger
people are talking about politics, and declaring an active
sympathy with radical ideas and revolutionary movements
abroad. I don't for a moment doubt the sincerity and commit-
ment of the Swedish left, but it too must operate in this
desolate psychic landscape—like the Swedish social democratic
venture as a whole. Left politics is the one rival to "nature" as
a respectable object of passion in Sweden. But, like the involve-
ment with nature, Swedish left politics becomes, in its context,
self-alienating. Radical ideas here rarely join with a radical
personal consciousness, a radical "psychology"—apart from
the conventional antinomianism and anti-bourgeois life-style
of youthful dropouts, which seems less relevant in permissive
Sweden than it does in the States. Holding radical ideas without
a consciousness transformed by them is, for instance, what has
limited the liberation of women of this country to formalistic,
partly token reforms.
One emotion most Swedes don't feel, never have felt, is
resentment—except, perhaps, the leftish young, who still have
to grope to find targets for their resentment, and find them
mostly outside the borders of Sweden. The overwhelming and
tangible presence of governmental benevolence discourages
that. (Any ten or more people collecting for a purpose which
could be called cultural or educational are eligible for a gov-
ernment subsidy.) In the United States resentment is a wide-
spread emotion and violence, directed against both human
beings and nature, a characteristic act. Violence is the act of
the underdog. But there are no underdogs in Sweden—at least
that is the official self-understanding in the society, an under-
standing still shared, I would guess, by a majority of the newly
radicalized young people. Hence, the low incidence of violent
acts here: Sweden may have double the American suicide rate
but it has one-tenth the rate of murder, manslaughter, and
rape. While there must be a good deal of latent violence here
(given the self-contempt and repressed rage one senses in many
people) the leading idea of Swedish life remains the refusal
of violence, even (wherever possible) of force. This is a country
which fights no wars, where capital punishment was abolished
40 years ago, which recently became the first in the world to
ban DDT. A Viet-Nam demonstration of 10,000 people can
march through the main streets of Stockholm with hardly any
visible surveillance from the police. In its entire modern
history, Sweden has had only one moment of civic violence,
and that in 1931—when the police broke up a Communist-led
strike of sawmill workers in Adalen, a timber-producing area
in the north, and a panicky cop fired into the crowd killing
five people. (The Adalen disaster is the subject of a recent
book by Birger Norman and of Bo Widerberg's new movie, his
first since Elvira Madigan.) Almost the only other violation of
the Swedish domestic peace was one mild (by our standards)
confrontation between New Left youth and the police. When
demonstrators came to Bastad, the resort of the south where
international tennis matches are held, to protest Rhodesia's
participation in the May 1968 games, a few were pushed
around and clubbed by the police, and some tear gas was used.
No one was badly hurt. But the reaction of Swedes of all
political persuasions was shock and incredulity: what happens
in other countries just doesn't happen here.
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Imagine a society committed to fulfilling any reasonable
demand for improvement (short of changing the basic system),
avowedly disposed to remedying injustices where it can per-
ceive them. Imagine a society which not only doesn't allow any-
one to be destitute, but which tries to be flexible enough to pre-
vent anyone from being too unhappy. Back in the early Beatle
era, some young draftees protested being made to cut their
hair short. (Compulsory military service here lasts ten months,
after which one can be recalled three times, at intervals of six
years, for 20 days.) At first, the Army stood firm, but when the
matter became public, so many people thought the barbering
policy unfair that eventually the Army gave in and stopped
enforcing it. One of the most cheerful street sights in Stock-
holm is the occasional Swedish soldier or sailor with his hair
down to the shoulders of his neat uniform, looking a mixture
of blond barbudo and hippy. I suppose I'm mentioning that
because, of course, government's benevolence doesn't stop
people from being unhappy (only from making a fuss); and
cheerful visions on the streets of Stockholm are memorable.
The dark winter is excruciating. Even the coming of s p r i n g -
when people stand immobile in the middle of the sidewalk,
their faces lifted to the sun—and those few weeks of summer
for which the Swedes are so grateful, have their own pathos.
Inner weather here is dark, and psychological insight—which
would be only the beginning of a new consciousness for the
Swedes—is generally felt to be threatening. (A revealing
statistic: though mental patients occupy 40 per cent of the
hospital beds, only seven per cent of the nation's doctors are
treating them. Health services are otherwise excellent, but
apparently few medical students long to go into psychiatry.)
Sweden has set me thinking more about the relation of
national character to the possibilities and direction of social
change. The Swedish hang-ups I've been describing are ob-
viously old and yet they are also of a piece with the society
in its present form. Many foreigners have complained about
the disillusioning dullness of the Swedish "welfare state," but
this is facile. First, Sweden isn't dull. That's not how to
describe what goes wrong here. Second, it seems clear that
the basic features of Sweden's problem date from centuries
ago and constitute a kind of national temperament, a collective
historical tradition of emotional disablement: the evidence of
accounts by travelers who visited Sweden in the 17th, 18th, and
19th centuries indicates that the general outline of Swedish
temperament has remained amazingly stable. I don't believe
for a moment that Social Democracy or the "welfare state" is
responsible for the profounder defects in the quality of Swedish
life. But it is necessary to observe that the advent of totally
secular, "enlightened," society operating under the aegis of
capitalism and Social Democracy hasn't fundamentally
altered the Swedish problem. Which is perhaps only to say
that Sweden has enjoyed a great reform, not a radical change.
Humane and ingenious as these reforms are, they don't strike
at the root of the situation of the Swedes as human beings. They
have not awakened the Swedes from their centuries' old chronic
state of depression, they have not liberated new energy, they
have not—and cannot—create a New Man. To do that Sweden
needs a revolution.
See you soon. iHasta la victoria siempre! Love,
Susan
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